Offering Wraparound Services for Child Welfare and Juvenile Justice-Involved Youth in Illinois

Impact Highlight: Thanks to streamlined data collection and referral mechanism process, a 90-day lag time was cut to three days. In response, when Illinois youth in foster care became involved in the juvenile justice system, DCFS was quickly notified and could get the youth connected to supportive services. 

Challenge: 

• In 2016, analysis found that each year nearly 700 young people in Illinois became involved in both the foster care system and the juvenile delinquency system. 
  • On average, an annual cohort of 700 youth experienced 1,300 arrests per year, and throughout their time in foster care, spent a collective 230,000 days in congregate care. 
• These justice-involved foster youth often show signs of traumatic stress and demonstrate high levels of truancy, increased behavioral health challenges, and low likelihoods of achieving permanency in a family setting. 
• Coordinating supportive services for these youth is difficult because child welfare is managed by the state, while the juvenile justice system is decentralized across city police departments, county-run juvenile probation offices and detention centers, and the state’s juvenile corrections facilities. 
• The Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice (IDJJ), Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), and local probation departments wanted to improve the outcomes for these youth by ensuring they could be safely placed with families and in the community rather than in institutional care. They also wanted to enhance well-being that would prepare the youth for successful transitions to adulthood and prevent future delinquency and criminal behavior. 

Innovation: 

The GPL worked with the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice to streamline processes and develop new approaches to better serve dually involved youth by: 

• Reducing a multi-week reporting lag to DCFS when a foster care youth entered the juvenile justice system. The agency reduced a nearly 90-day wait time to less than three days by eliminating handwritten reports faxed to a central office for manual transcription into a database. The department streamlined data collection and referral mechanisms to create a live, state-wide list of dually involved youth, allowing youth to more quickly get matched to supportive services.  
• Instituting family-centered care coordination. Typically, a dually involved youth would have a state-level child welfare case manager and a county-level probation officer. Yet, there was little coordination between the two, and the youth’s needs were determined by clinical professionals relying on inflexible treatment programs. Now, trained facilitators help ensure service planning involves the youth, their families, and everyone involved with the case. These facilitators also help identify permanent homes for youth to avoid residential institutionalization. 
• Augmenting service capacity to address complex needs of dually-involved youth. Illinois expanded the availability of behavioral therapies and family-based alternatives to group care for dually involved youth such as family therapy, psychotherapy, academic support, pro-social activities, substance abuse treatment, and career and employment support.  
• Launching a performance-based contract with six service providers to create the Conscience Community Network (CCN) between providers and the state to better coordinate care. The five state CCN staffers met weekly to share performance data on outcome metrics, such as progress on goals, and enrollment in therapies. Frontline staff from all six providers also met regularly to share best practices and brainstorm solutions to barriers to care. 
  • The CCN was responsible for maintaining the list of dually involved youth, matching them with a care coordinator, and referring them to services. 
  • The contract created an accountability structure that made CCN responsible for ensuring no youth fell through the cracks.